


The World I Know

by irolltwenties (Shenanigans)



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Coda, M/M, Malex, i don't know how to tag, it's a thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-20 18:13:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18530446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shenanigans/pseuds/irolltwenties
Summary: Alex hadn’t meant to get shot. It wasn’t at the top of his to do list for the day. He’d wanted to maybe drive out to the prison and find it empty. He’d hoped, just a little wistfully and without any real conviction, that he was wrong.





	The World I Know

Alex hadn’t meant to get shot. It wasn’t at the top of his to do list for the day. He’d wanted to maybe drive out to the prison and find it empty. He’d hoped, just a little wistfully and without any real conviction, that he was wrong. He’d have driven an hour North with Michael in the backseat, the smell of his aftershave just a little spicy and close in the Humvee. It wouldn’t have been for nothing, just the disappointment of one more empty lead. His to do list may have included watching Michael eat sour patch kids in the backseat, sullen and glowering at the back of Kyle’s head. So, at least he got one thing right.

The morning started in sunshine. It ended in fire.

He was staring up at the night sky, the lightning crackling and branching. The rumble of thunder shaking the windows in his cabin. It was somewhere to his left, but his chest was burning with an incandescent white torture. It was a different kind of pain. He thought he’d known all of the different ways he could be hurt. He thought his father had taught him more than anyone would ever need to learn there, but this was like a blowtorch- scorching and focused. It blocked out everything else but the way the world would light up, flash burned images in the rain. “Always so fucking dramatic,” he muttered, tasting the familiar friend of blood in his mouth.

After the Prison, the silent tense drive, and the quiet way Michael had just said “Take me to Max.” He’d waited until Kyle had climbed into his sensible Ford and driven away. He’d waited, hip cramped and painful while the knotted muscle under the scar tissue started to calm down. He rubbed at his knee, the surgeries leaving the knee cap tight and inflexible. The junkyard was starting to rattle in the wind pushing ahead of the storm boiling up from the west, hubcaps clattering like a mangled wind chime. He knew that his leg was swollen where it ended. He knew it would be bruised, red levity marks pressed into the scar thickened skin where the seal had torqued when Michael had pulled him roughly to the ground. He’d felt the way the tension shifted wrong, the angle of the ankle joint going loose in the steps back to the car. He’d planned to go home and soak, to rest and heat out the strain of the day.

He’d planned to wait.

 

“God damn it,” he breathed, choking a little and coughing even as he forced himself to move, hand disconnected feeling as he reached and pressed against where the bullet had slammed into him.

 

“If there’s a gun in the first act,” Mr Peterson had intoned, voice a dry nasal basalt- deadpan despite the bass. He’d been a barrel chested man of no more than 5’6 with a hooked nose and decades of disappointment coloring the way he taught AP English. “It will be used in the third.”

Alex remembers thinking that was silly, but now, bleeding out in the dirt thousands of miles from the last place he’d thought he was going to die, he wasn’t so sure. Of course, he’d been distracted in the back row of class by the way Guerin’s shoulders looked stretching the gray cotton of his t-shirt. He was always distracted by him. Michael was clever, sharply brilliant and sardonic. He was the kid who corrected the teachers and smirked into detention. Alex pierced his septum and learned to line his eyes, but he maintained perfect attendance. At least at school he was safer. The shoves into the locker, the taunts, the halfhearted posturing held no fear for him.

In his first act Jesse Manes had been a fist.

 

The hallways of his house were dangerous with doors. He knew to stay small, quiet and watching when he was home. His brothers were all gone now. They’d followed into the Air Force and flung out into the world to learn how to be strong. There were four empty rooms and one empty man. Alex avoided home; he would study at the Crash Down with Maria shoulder to shoulder as she squinted at his Trig. He would take extra shifts at the Museum. He had seven work shirts and three stupid green visors.

The second act he was a hammer slammed so hard it _bounced_ on bone.

He pulled away bloody fingers, rolling his eyes and arching at a shock of pain, heel digging into the dirt as he squirmed, instinctively trying to push away from it. He remembers this crawl, the way the body forces itself to move- involuntary and jarring. He remembers the way the floor in the kitchen felt, the scumbled texture of the terrazzo under his cheek as he panted through the white speckled pain. He remembered the way his scalp had ached for days, a patch bloody and scabbing from where his Father had pulled him from the tool shed by the hair. He remembered the way he’d almost managed to crawl to where his Squad was dying, nauseous and shocky before he passed out from the pain.

 

Michael had been nearly falling out of his truck, exhausted, loose limbed and lost sometime after three in the morning. Alex had stepped down off the porch, sweatpants knotted under his knee as he used two crutches to head out to meet him. His breath white in the night, blooming from him as he watched. Guerin looked wrecked, eyes hollow and lost even as a new bruise started to darken on his jaw. The cabin was lit in two windows, the porch light throwing a yellow glow over the drive. Michael just stared at him, gaze like a physical touch and Alex had simply started down the three steps from the porch, crutches and heel crunching over the gravel. He was bundled into a jacket he’d thrown on over his threadbare band shirt he wore to bed.

 

There was three feet between them, just a breath away and Michael was shivering. This close he could feel the way the heat radiated off of him. He could feel the moment they were close enough because he planted his weight on one foot, balanced on his left hand crutch and closed his eyes. He felt the way Michael breathed his name like a question, like penance, like prayer. He felt the way his heart twisted up, stomach taut as their noses touched and Michael reached up to curl both hands around his neck. They stood like that for a heartbeat, five, more. Alex distilled in this moment to the swell of something sweet and warm in his veins. He didn’t care that it was cold. He didn’t need anything but the world of Michael’s heartbeat under his palm, his name on his lips, and the taste of his kiss. He only knew that right then Michael was touching him. Michael was here. He’d come _home_.

 

It’s why he didn’t notice his Father step out from the grove of cottonwoods behind the cabin. It’s why he didn’t hear the safety click off. Michael was kissing him and all he could think was that if he could just get him inside maybe the world could let them be for a little while. Michael always had that effect on him.

 

“I warned you about their kind.” They broke apart, Alex startling at the sound of his father’s voice.

 

“Dad, no.”

 

“I told you, son.” Master Sergeant Jesse Manes took aim. “They’re a violent race.”

 

Alex didn’t think, shoving Michael even as he pulled the trigger. In the third act, Jesse Manes was a gun.

 

He closed his eyes, head rocking back again as he swallowed. Another wild crack of lightning followed so close by thunder Alex was sure it had struck his cabin. The storm opened then, exhaling the swollen feel of the day. The rain slapped into the Mesa. It was relentless, hammering the ground until the sand went slick and gritty, mud slipping and staining into the back of his sweats. “I think he fucking shot me,” he whispered, blowing out a long slow breath as Michael scrambled to his side. He was wild eyed for the second time that day and Alex wanted to tell him to stop. He hated the way fear looked on him. He hated the way it made him shake and go splotchy, throat too tight and hair wild.

 

“No. No no no no,” Michael was talking, mouth moving on that one syllable, that one word over and over. He pulled his jacket off, bunching it up and pressing it against where Alex was bleeding. He cried out, he knows he did, eyes rolling back and he might have passed out for a moment, the rain breaking through the blackness. “You fucking stay with me. Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare leave. You’re not allowed. I didn’t mean it,” Michael was patting at his face, keeping him awake. “I didn’t mean it. I don’t want you to go.”

 

“You saying you like me, Guerin?” Alex licked his lips, feeling the moment his body started to shake. He tried to give him a smile, something short and crisp, as reassuring as he could get as his fingers went numb. The sky lit up, the storm rattling the windows in their panes, strobing the landscape white before going dark again. “Always so fucking dramatic.”

 

Michael’s curls were plastered to his head, rain dripping from the end of his nose where he was hunched over Alex. “I’m saying I love you, asshole,” Michael managed, bending close to touch their foreheads. “Now stay with me.” He could feel the small nod that went with the words. “Max is on his way.” He glanced around, nodding before Alex felt himself simply lift off the ground. “He can fix it. He can, I know he can. You can’t leave me alone. I just got you back.”

 

Alex closed his eyes. “Michael.” It was all he could manage before he passed out.

**Author's Note:**

> Come flail with me [here](irolltwenties.tumblr.com)!


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